Economists at Anthropic measured what work robots can do today, using Claude to cycle through and measure over 7,000 physical tasks across roughly 900 occupations against robots already deployed or demonstrated. Robots could handle 74% of physical tasks, which represents about 34% of all US working hours.
Then they added up all the costs, all the expenses related to deploying the robots. After accounting for the hardware, integration, maintenance, supervision, and insurance, robots were only cheaper than people on less than 1% of physical tasks.
Welding robots, for example, cost about 5x as much as a human welder. One outlier that is ripe for automation today is warehouse packing, where the math works. A packing robot costs about $45,000 a year against roughly $49,000 in labor. You might have seen the human vs robot packing bake-off video (above).
This was originally posted as a New Arrival in Thinking in Generations · The Catalog · №009, an issue of my weekly newsletter The Catalog. You can Subscribe for weekly insights, or get in touch to talk about what this means for your business.